Postcards recall golden age of railroads

COOL COLLECTIONS

Feb. 23, 2013

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Written by

Rachel Richardson

This is Kabakoff's favorite card because it 'takes you back to a different time.' He now has roughly 1,000 cards. / Photos by Taylor Norton/The Enquirer

IF YOU GO

The Greater Cincinnati Postcard Collectors Club meets 1 p.m. the second Sunday of each month from September through June at the Seasons Retirement Home, 7300 Dearwester Drive, Montgomery. If you have a collection you would like to show off, we want to hear from you. Please email Rachel Richardson at rrichardson@masonbuzz.com and include the following: your name, daytime phone, residence, a brief description of your collection and photos, if possible.

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Long before automobiles and jumbo jets, Americans traveled in style by train, with many passengers purchasing postcards published by rail companies. Scott Kabakoff’s collection of vintage railroad postcards recalls the golden age of American rail travel, when trains featured opulent interiors, porters for your every need and gleaming dining cars offering gourmet meal service.

The Montgomery history buff and teacher’s assistant began collecting railroadiana a decade ago and now boasts a collection of more than 1,000 railroad postcards.

About the collection: Most of the cards are railroad-related, with roughly 90 percent of them being vintage or antique postcards dated between the early 1900s and the late 1940s to early 1950s. They’re all digitized – I began scanning them in 2006 when I started to acquire some of the rarer and most expensive cards.

How did you get started? My sister was married at Cincinnati Union Terminal. One day I decided to go on eBay and plugged in “Cincinnati Union Terminal.” All these vintage postcards came up; I’ve never seen anything like it before. They were dirt cheap, a buck or $2 a piece, and I had to have one. Not long after, my wife and I got married (in 2003) and we took a two-week train ride across the country and it sparked my interest in railroads. I went back on eBay and put in “train,” “postcard” and “railroads” and all these wonderful postcards came up. I’ve been collecting them ever since.

Where do you find them? I find many of them on eBay and that’s really where the market is right now. There are other websites like Delcampe.net, a website for collectors, and CardCow.com, a site for card collectors. A lot of the buying and selling is done online. There are also conventions and collector’s shows that occur across the country. You can also pick them up at antique malls and shows. I’m also part of the Greater Cincinnati Postcard Collectors Club.

Rarest find: I have some cards from the Northern Pacific. It was famous for its dining car and services. They were nicknamed the “Great Big Baked Potato” railway and the cards have caricatures on them of a big baked potato. I got them in 2011-2012 and they could go anywhere from $20-$40 each. These dining cars were akin to really nice restaurants. The railroads spared little to no expense for the comfort of their guests. Now you go on Amtrak and you might as well get McDonald’s.

Favorite postcard: I love this card (1920s-era card of a Victorian woman speaking on a phone) because that kind of phone technology in the 1920s was absolutely novel. Most people at that time didn’t even have phones and it’s something that most people wouldn’t have been able to do. I was in Chicago at an antique show in 2012 and I was thumbing through some postcards and boom, it was there. I think I paid around $50 for it. It was expensive, but it was definitely worth it.

Luckiest find: The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in the 1940s developed a new streamliner called the “Chessie.” The Chessie was the company’s nickname and they had a logo of a sleeping kitten. Before the launch, they commissioned an artist to draw renditions of what life would be like inside the Chessie. These pictures were made into postcards and I have four of them. They’re very hard to find today because even though they did the postcards, the train never actually ran. It was nixed before it even went one inch out of the terminal. I found three on eBay for around $10-$20 and one at a show in Chicago. If I were to put them on auction online, they’d go for $70 for the four cards.

What’s the attraction for you? These postcard views preserve a way of travel that, to most, is totally unknown today. It captures a moment in time, a way of life and travel that we don’t really have any more. I kind of experience the travels vicariously through the postcards.